Everyone is welcome to all or parts of a seminar on "Vital Geographies" at 
the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. If you would like to 
come along could you drop a note to me - Gerry Kearns, 
[log in to unmask] - so that I can arrange coffees and sandwiches etc. 
There is no charge for this meeting which is sponsored by the ESRC. 
Graduate students wishing to come should particularly get in touch as we 
will subsidise travel for as many as we can

Gerry Kearns

Monday 27 August
10.30 Coffee

11.00 Paul Draus, University of Michigan-Dearborn, [log in to unmask]: 
'Digging Detroit: drugs, work and worth in the aftermath of abandonment' 
Paul is the author of a marvelous ethnography of people in a zone of 
abandonment: Consumed in the city: observing tuberculosis at century's end 
(Temple University Press, 2004).

11.45 Susan Craddock, University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, 'Vital 
Circulations: The Geopolitics of Tuberculosis', [log in to unmask] Susan is 
the author of an excellent work in historical medical geography: City of 
Plagues: disease, poverty, and deviance in San Francisco (University of 
Minnesota Press, 2000). She has since been working on issues of 
globalization and AIDS: [with Ezekial Malipeni, Joseph Oppong, and Jayati 
Ghosh, AIDS in Africa: beyond epidemiology (Blackwell, 2004).

13.00 Lunch

14.30 Richard Smith, University of Cambridge, [log in to unmask], Aging, 
gender and entitlements under the English Old Poor Law; Charting and 
explaining regional contrasts Richard is a historical demographer looking 
at long-term shifts in the nature of welfare entitlements and the effects 
this has upon longevity and healthiness.

15.15 Jim Oeppen, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, 
[log in to unmask] 'How efficient from a social planner's perspective are 
current age-specific changes in mortality? A cross-country comparison.' Jim 
is a demographer who has been working recently on population projections 
for the elderly portion of the population. With James Vaupel, he published 
an article, 'Broken limits to life expectancy,' on this in Science in 2002.

16.00 Tea

16.30 Alan Ingram, University College London, [log in to unmask], 
'HIV/AIDS, security and the geopolitics of US-Nigerian relations' Alan 
works on issues of global security and the geopolitics of health. He edited 
a collection of essays on this: Health, foreign policy and security: 
towards a conceptual framework for research and policy (Nuffield Trust, 
2004)

19.30 Dinner

Tuesday 28 August
10.30 Coffee

11.00 Sridhar Venkatapuram, University of Cambridge, [log in to unmask], 
'Extending the Capabilities Approach of Nussbaum and Sen' Sridhar is a 
graduate student at Cambridge examining the differences between rights and 
capabilities as ways of thinking about health entitlements

11.45 Gerry Kearns, University of Cambridge, [log in to unmask], 
'Thinking about health entitlements: utility, contract, capabilities, 
convention, or a mixed model?'

13.00 Lunch

14.30 Matthew Gandy, University College London, [log in to unmask], 'Urban 
bulimia and the prosthetic city' Matthew works on the political ecology of 
cities and his wonderful publications include: Concrete and clay: reworking 
nature in New York City (MIT Press, 2002); (edited with Alimuddin Zimla) 
The return of the White Plague: global poverty and the 'new tuberculosis' 
(Verso, 2003); Hydropolis (Campus, 2006).

15.15 Michael Brown, University of Washington-Seattle, 
[log in to unmask], 'Everybody gets VD!: Sexualities and Urban 
Public Health Politics in PostWar Seattle' Michael is a political 
geographer who was worked on issues of AIDS and on the spaces of gay 
political organization in the city. His exciting publications include: 
Replacing citizenship: AIDS activism and radical democracy (Guilford, 
1997); Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe 
(Routledge, 2000).

16.00 Tea

16.30 David Nally, University of Cambridge, [log in to unmask], 'Human 
Incumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine, 1847-53' David 
is preparing a book on the Great Irish Famine that extends the biopolitical 
theories of Foucault and Agamben in thinking about the politics of 
starvation.

17.15 Drinks reception